This national monument is ‘part of the true history of the USA’. Will it survive Trump 2.0? | California

IT is easy to get lost in the Highlands of Sáttítla in the northeast of distant California. There are kilometers of hilly lava fields, intact forests and obsidian mountains. At night, darkness and silence extend indefinitely.

It is one of the new American national monuments. It is also one of the most threatened.

In January, the Pit River tribe celebrated a victory of decades in manufacturing when Joe Biden granted federal protection to nearly 230,000 acres of wooded land with the creation of the National Monument of Highlands Sáttítla.

“The impressive geological wonders described collectively here as the highlands of Sáttítla have framed the countries of origin of Aboriginal communities and cultures during millennia,” said proclamation, recognizing the area as “deeply sacred”.

The tribe, as well as environmental groups, had fought for years to protect the land from the development of industrial energy. The region just north of Mount Shasta, popular for leisure and some of the darkest nocturnal skies in the United States, is the site of the history of the creation of the tribe and regularly used for ceremonies.

“It is a place of healing for our employees. It is really linked to our traditional health, “said Brandy McDaniels, member of the Pit River tribe. “We have spent a life trying to defend this area.”

The designation guarantees that no future energy development and mineral extraction can occur in the field while keeping them available for public leisure.

But in March, Donald Trump said that he would cancel Biden’s action and the return protections for Sáttítla and the national monument of Chuckwalla, which he argued “to lock up large amounts of land of economic development and energy production”.

Although legal experts say that there is no clear mechanism for a president to cancel the protections of the monument – only to reduce them – the Ministry of Justice has argued in a recent note that it is in fact in the authority of Trump to “modify a previous declaration”, suggesting that the administration goes ahead with efforts to remove the designations of national monuments for hundreds of thousands of deserts.

Now, while the tribe tries to move forward after years of push with limited resources, pro bono lawyers and “scratching every penny” to go to hearings and demonstrations, another battle could be on the horizon.

‘Almost as if you were in another world’

Located five o’clock in the northeast of the California State Capitol in a sparsely populated region, Sáttítla is far from the beaten track.

“You are not trying to go elsewhere if you go. It is very dark, it is very calm, there is no reception of mobile phone,” said Nick Joslin, director of politics and plea at the Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, an environmental advocacy group. “It’s very easy to get lost.”

The 224,676 acres of the monument include parts of the national forests of Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath, are home to flora and endangered fauna, massive underground volcanic aquifers which provide water to millions of people and store as much water as 200 of the largest surface reserves of California. Due to heavy snow, it is widely accessible only in car for a few months of the year.

The landscape, with its islands of old -fashioned pine forests, mountain sides covered with snow and dispersed lakes, is magnificent and another world. It is filled with unique geological characteristics such as ice caves, lava tubes and lava flows, said Joslin. Then there is the sleeping volcano of half a million, about 10 times the size of Mount St Helens, in the monument. The inhabitants camp regularly, travel the hundreds of kilometers of trails or take boats on Medicine Lake.

“It is a place known for its high quality of silence that you cannot live in any other place, and also its night sky,” said McDaniels. “Depending on where you are, people describe it because it is almost as if you were in another world, as if you were on another planet.”

There are markers of human disturbance. In checkered with forest bands where the trees have been clear and large stretches of the field with second growth trees that look like toothpicks.

For indigenous peoples, this area is sacred as the place of the story of the creation of the Pit River tribe. The tribe organizes important ceremonies there and collects basic foods such as Manzanita berries and blackcurrant plants, sugar pine seeds and plants used in medicinal capacity.

“The landscape of the region literally tells the story of our people. In this way, it is part of the true history of the United States of America,” said McDaniels.

An unlikely landscape under threat

The tribe fought to protect the region for almost three decades, she added, questioning geothermal development and large-scale forest exploitation.

Given that Sáttítítla is a volcanic area, there were speculations according to which there could be enough heat to develop geothermal resources, and in the 1980s, the federal government granted leases over thousands of acres to private energy companies, declared Deborah A Sivas, director of the clinic of environmental law in Stanford.

The Environment Law Clinic represented the tribe in a series of disputes contesting the extension of certain leases and the proposed projects, arguing that the federal government had not consulted the tribe, said Sivas. The development of industrial energy would have required a spectacular transformation of the landscape to be carried out and the tribe was opposed to such intrusion on sacred land, and feared the hydraulic fracturing used to generate geothermal energy could pollute aquifers.

In the end, there was not the potential for resources initially thought out, said Sivas. The final settlement with Calpine, the last company remaining with land control, was signed just two days after the declaration of the monument.

Although there was a large community support for a monument, noted Joslin, some elected officials from the conservative region were more warm.

Doug Lamalfa, a member of the congress whose district includes Sáttít, described Biden’s action as an “excessive scope” and argued that it “would create unnecessary challenges for land management, in particular in the prevention of forest fires and the maintenance of the use of local residents”.

But there was no opposition organized against the monument.

Presidents have the power to give land status to land with cultural, scientific or historical resources of national importance, and Biden and other presidents have generally used it for conservation and to support the tribes.

In the case of Sáttítla, the designation protects against the development of industrial energy, but does not prevent leisure, said Sivas, or prohibiting the Forest Service from doing forest fire management work.

But Trump took a combative position on the national monuments as part of his pro-energy program, reducing the ears of Utah bears and national staircase monuments of the Great during his first mandate (a decision which was then reversed by Biden). Earlier this month, the Ministry of Justice published a memorandum notice arguing that Trump has the power not only to shrink, but to completely remove the national monuments created by its predecessor.

But the legal argument for this position seems tenuous. Sivas said that the Antiquity Act, the status under which the national monuments are designated, does not give the president the authority to do so.

“There is no language in there that suggests that it could disappoint or to retreat what the previous presidents have done,” said Sivas. She added that the recent argument put forward by the administration was not particularly convincing.

Given the lack of opposition to Sáttítla, this decision seems to be designed to test the limits of the President’s power, said Sivas. If the administration proceeds with a decline, a legal action will follow, she added, which expects the Supreme Court to head towards the Supreme Court.

“We are going to lay litigation if this happens. It is a kind of canary in the coal mine. ”

McDaniels described protection protection efforts as “perplexes”. She underlined the speech of the interior secretary Doug Burgum at the National Congress of American Indians in which he indicated that he did not believe that the “most precious places” of the country, such as parks and monuments, should be targeted for development.

But the tribe focuses on the celebration of the monument, informing the public of the importance of these lands and ensuring that it continues to serve as a place of healing to the indigenous peoples who have endured a long history of genocidal acts and injustices, said McDaniels.

“Truth and healing cannot start if we are constantly fighting to protect our sacred lands,” said McDaniels.

“This is what we do not want for our children, our grandchildren and all future generations. Everyone deserves the right to live the gifts that this land makes people at the disposal. ”